(Reuters) – Post-mortems on two Azerbaijani brothers who died in Russian police custody have shown that they were beaten to death, authorities in the South Caucasus country said on Tuesday as tensions rose sharply between Moscow and Baku.
Azerbaijani prosecutors said they had opened a criminal investigation into the alleged murders of Huseyn and Ziyaddin Safarov following their arrest last week in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg.
The case concerns “the torture and deliberate killing with particular cruelty of Azerbaijani citizens and ethnic Azerbaijanis by officers of law enforcement agencies of the Russian Federation”, the state prosecutor’s office said.
In a further deepening of the crisis, Azerbaijan on Monday detained seven Russian journalists, drawing a protest from Moscow. A Baku court placed two of them, Igor Kartavykh and Yevgeny Belousov, under formal pre-trial arrest on Tuesday on charges of fraud, illegal entrepreneurship and money laundering.
Reuters was not able to immediately contact lawyers for the pair, both senior figures at the local branch of a state-run Russian news agency.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the journalists’ arrests were an “extremely emotional reaction” by Azerbaijan, and Russia aimed to negotiate their release.
An Azerbaijani government source told Reuters that about 15 more Russians had been arrested separately on suspicion of drug trafficking and cybercrime. The source shared videos showing them being handcuffed, made to march in line and bundled into police vans.
The cases threaten to severely damage relations between Russia and Azerbaijan, an oil-producing country and former Soviet republic that has close ties with Turkey.
Russia summoned the Azerbaijani ambassador to Moscow on Tuesday to receive an official protest over “the latest unfriendly actions of Baku, deliberate steps by the Azerbaijani side to dismantle bilateral relations”, the Russian foreign ministry said.
At the meeting, Azerbaijan’s envoy Rahman Mustafayev condemned the “use of torture and degrading treatment” of the Azerbaijani citizens in Russian custody, an Azerbaijani foreign ministry spokesman said in a statement.
Mustafayev demanded that Russia conduct a “thorough and objective investigation of these attacks, as well as take urgent measures to bring the perpetrators to justice”, the spokesman, Aykhan Hajizada, said.
Hajizada defended the raid on the Russian media office in Azerbaijan as lawful and said the investigation would continue.
FORENSIC TESTS
The chain of events began last week when investigators in Yekaterinburg, a Russian industrial city, conducted scores of raids against ethnic Azerbaijanis whom they suspected of complicity in historic unsolved crimes, including serial killings.
Russian investigators initially said Ziyaddin had died of heart failure and did not give a cause for death for Huseyn. The bodies of the men arrived in Baku on Monday evening.
Adalat Hasanov, head of forensic examination at Azerbaijan’s health ministry, said fresh post-mortems showed the brothers both died of “post-traumatic shock” due to severe beatings.
Russian examiners’ assertion that Ziyaddin, who was born in 1970, died of heart failure, was a “blatant falsehood”, Hasanov told reporters.
“During the follow-up examination, we discovered multiple fractures on Ziyaddin’s body resulting from beatings. All of his ribs were broken, and a haemorrhage was found on his head, also caused by blunt force trauma,” he said.
The other brother, Huseyn, born in 1966, also died as a result of beatings, Hasanov said. He said all of the deceased internal organs had been removed during the previous autopsy in Russia, “which may indicate an attempt to conceal the true cause of death”.
Azerbaijan and Russia have traded barbs since the men’s deaths, with Baku accusing Russian police of carrying out extrajudicial killings “on ethnic grounds”, an allegation Moscow has rejected. Russian investigators said all six men arrested held Russian passports.
The Azerbaijani police raid targeting Russian journalists in Baku was conducted at the office of Sputnik Azerbaijan, the local branch of the state-run Rossiya Segodnya news agency.
